Started the fill slowly to check for leaks along the way, although it has been test filled, it's not been test filled to sit on top of £x amount of AV equipment
.
Took a bucket of dirty gravel vacuumed from one of my tanks(George's, tends to be the dirtiest). Filled waited a few minutes, checked for leaks and that the stand would support the weight, better to be safer rather than sorry with this one, and moved on the next bucket. Rinse and repeat until full, in the end it just goes to show how daft this tank is, 4 big buckets and it was nearly there so we just topped it up with fresh water.
Here is it full with the canister input and output in place:
Here is the canister, ok so it's no ehiem but it will do the job:
Then came the job of adding the media to the trays, as mentioned before, as the idea was to keep this as cheap as possible to setup. I made use of what I had lying around.
I've got so many off cuts of jap matting lying around it seemed to be the perfect choice. 3 trays, the bottom had a 2 layer of matting cut to fit, the second I filled with k1 and the third with one layer of matting with a finer filter foam on top, all loaded in, job done:
All that was left was to add the heater and fire up the canister. Sounds simple enough, the only real problem we had was filling the canister, as the tank is sat so low and the canister is quite tall there was only a 2cm gap between the two and this filter came with a lot of hose. After ten or so minutes trying to direct water into the thing we moved the filter to the other side of the room so the pipes could be angled down to fill and prime it.
Filter done, light rig added:
Now I hate to see a tank setup with no fish in so I keep some special ones that always go into a new tank when it's cycling, some say it's cruel but I always do it
I thought great sit back relax job done, so I went to pick up Mrs Y from work came back to find 2 missed calls and 3 txt messages. At this point I thought 'tank broke water everywhere', this was not the case, Dan had gone out to buy bogwood and was very confused about what to with as the garden center he'd been to said to soak it first
. Took a bucket of dirty gravel vacuumed from one of my tanks(George's, tends to be the dirtiest). Filled waited a few minutes, checked for leaks and that the stand would support the weight, better to be safer rather than sorry with this one, and moved on the next bucket. Rinse and repeat until full, in the end it just goes to show how daft this tank is, 4 big buckets and it was nearly there so we just topped it up with fresh water.
Here is it full with the canister input and output in place:
Here is the canister, ok so it's no ehiem but it will do the job:
Then came the job of adding the media to the trays, as mentioned before, as the idea was to keep this as cheap as possible to setup. I made use of what I had lying around.
I've got so many off cuts of jap matting lying around it seemed to be the perfect choice. 3 trays, the bottom had a 2 layer of matting cut to fit, the second I filled with k1 and the third with one layer of matting with a finer filter foam on top, all loaded in, job done:
All that was left was to add the heater and fire up the canister. Sounds simple enough, the only real problem we had was filling the canister, as the tank is sat so low and the canister is quite tall there was only a 2cm gap between the two and this filter came with a lot of hose. After ten or so minutes trying to direct water into the thing we moved the filter to the other side of the room so the pipes could be angled down to fill and prime it.
Filter done, light rig added:
Now I hate to see a tank setup with no fish in so I keep some special ones that always go into a new tank when it's cycling, some say it's cruel but I always do it
I thought great sit back relax job done, so I went to pick up Mrs Y from work came back to find 2 missed calls and 3 txt messages. At this point I thought 'tank broke water everywhere', this was not the case, Dan had gone out to buy bogwood and was very confused about what to with as the garden center he'd been to said to soak it first
I'm just happy to see it up and running, even if it's not in my house
